Philip Larkin

Train Wreck*

Who knows when you lost the muse--
maybe it started to go

back in nineteen-sixty-three,
along with your virginity
and the scratched up
Beatles album.
Maybe the first time
you heard Bechet’s stick…
Was the voice that fell like love
the inception of your silence?
Pure bliss to give birth to such noise
but the closest you came
was the poetry of the gutbucket
and so those evenings spent
with Kingsley
Ginned up at the pub
Staggering back to Monica
and the House on Hull…
Trampling the frail cut grass
Dreaming of the Bayou

while baying at the moon

over the imminent white hours of death.

*Train wreck: Event during the playing of a tune when the musicians "disagree" on where they are in the form (i.e. someone gets lost), so the chord changes and the melody may get confused for several bars, but depending on the abilities of the musicians (it happens to the best of them), there are usually no fatalities and the journey continues.